Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
We are very much in the wilderness, traveling together through the desert. This fellowship has revealed to me how much all Jews need Torah – and how much the Torah needs all Jews, especially those who feel most at the edges of the camp.
I rediscovered the power of art and creativity from the other New Voices fellows; when I write the next niggun, I will send it to them first.
We are still at the beginning of this period, and it can still feel like a miracle; we will learn more from this moment if we remember that it is nothing less than a revolution, and that we are responsible for helping this revolution reach all Jews.
To be honest, as a young Jewish woman from Los Angeles who lives in Washington D.C., I never imagined I would ever come into contact with Nazis. Despite my fears, I knew this was something I had to do. I don’t regret the decision at all.
While the two may have dramatic differences, I think that the successful model of the millennia-long conversations that make up Talmud can teach us a lot about how to argue – and understand each other – on Twitter.
“Awakening” suggested a kind of milestone, a coming-of-age, almost a second bat mitzvah. Here was my unofficial rite of passage into the real Jewish world: not an aliyah, but anti-Semitism.
These are miracles not because they shake the earth or defy the laws of nature, but rather because I was crazy and tender and hopeful enough to ask for them.
Figuring out who I am as an interfaith Jew has been complicated, but I have gotten to the point where I am more confident in my identity. Yes, I am the person who proudly wears Chrismukkah sweaters to parties.
The next day, atop Masada, I chose my Hebrew name and began my Jewish life. I was Rivkah, Matriarch; I was done taking shit from any human, institution, or supreme being. The Judaism I found gave me space to be newly brazen, and radically myself.
I remember telling my mother on the first night of Hanukkah sometime in high school that I didn’t want to sing “Hanukkah O Hanukkah” or anything else in English while we lit the candles. However, I also didn’t want or know how to sing the Hebrew prayers, wrapped as they were in religiosity, complicated words, and foreign melodies.
We cannot defeat anti-Semitism in isolation. In fact, it is the same ideology that puts all of us – Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, and people of color – at risk of violence.
That was all the time it took to make it clear that there is no “both sides” when it comes to the brutalizers of Yitzhar and the nearby Palestinian villagers who are brutalized by them.
My decision to not write about leaving the paper had an unexpected consequence, one I hadn’t considered in my months of thought and regret: it left space for reconciliation.
My first encounter with a hyper-masculine Israeli man was on my Birthright trip in the summer of 2017. He was a soldier – stout, muscular, uniformed – paired with my group as a part of mifgash for the whole 10 days we were there, and a few days into the trip he decided he would sit in the empty seat beside me on the bus.
As an Orthodox Jewish feminist, I’ve struggled my whole life with what feels to me to be stubbornly sexist interpretations of halacha and my own loyalty and love for observant Judaism. Mavoi Satum fights to protect the rights of women in the rabbinic courts, but does so from the basis of religious observance.